We recently fixed a security vulnerability in the way project titles are handled on project home pages. Prior to this it was possible to create a project which included Javascript in its name, and thus inject code into the page. After investigating this incident, we have determined that this vulnerability has not been exploited for any malicious purpose; no data was leaked and no users were exposed to injected code.

This vulnerability was reported to us on June 20, 2018, by Lacroute Serge. We began testing fixes around three hours later, which were deployed about 15 hours after the original report, on June 21, 2018.

The fixes for this vulnerability are contained in pull requests #4710 and #4711 for the Panoptes Front End project on GitHub. Anyone running their own hosted copy of this should pull these changes as soon as possible.

We have investigated the cause and assessed the impact of this vulnerability. A summary of what we found follows:

• No data was leaked as a result of this vulnerability. The vulnerability was not exploited for any malicious purpose and there was no unauthorised access to any of our systems.
• The vulnerability was introduced on September 12, 2017, in a change which was part of our work to allow projects to be translated into multiple languages.
• We found three projects that contained exploits for this vulnerability (not including projects created by our own team for testing purposes): two were created before the vulnerability was introduced, so the exploit wouldn’t have worked at the time they were created (it might have worked if the projects were visited between September 12, 2017, and June 21, 2018, but no-one did so); the remaining project was created by the security researcher who reported the vulnerability.
• Our audit included previous titles for projects (all changes to projects are versioned, so we were able to audit any project titles which have since been changed).
• All three projects contained only benign code to display a JavaScript alert box. None of them attempted to perform any malicious actions.
• No users other than the project owner and members of our development team visited any of these projects, so no other users activated any of the exploits.

We’d like to thank Lacroute Serge for reporting this vulnerability to us via the method detailed on our security page, following responsible disclosure by reporting it to us in private to give us the opportunity to fix it.